Administrative violence: The hidden barrier to justice for GBV survivors

During 16 Days of Activism against Gender-Based Violence, we will hear the same devastating stories of women and children who have suffered physical, sexual and emotional violence – often at the hands of those close to them. These stories are valid and necessary, and must be told.

 But this year, we should also pause to look at another form of violence, one that is quieter and harder to see. It happens in waiting rooms, in court corridors, and in piles of unprocessed paperwork. It is administrative, not physical, but its impact can be just as profound and debilitating.

 The phrase “administrative harm” or “administrative violence” describes the violations people suffer when systems meant to protect them instead trap them in bureaucracy. It refers to the everyday violence caused by delay, inaction and indifference. It speaks to systems where nothing moves, and no one takes responsibility. 

Although the term first appeared in the context of healthcare, it perfectly captures what happens in South African courts – particularly in our criminal courts. When a record isn’t sent, when a trial has been stalled for months or years, when files go missing and officials shrug, that’s administrative harm. It’s not visible like physical violence, but it is violence all the same, and it is slow, procedural and devastating. 

The criminal justice system fails women in many ways. It fails survivors of rape and abuse through disbelief, delay and indifference, through low conviction rates for gender-based crimes, through cases that collapse for lack of evidence that may never have been properly collected, and through a culture that still doubts women’s accounts of their own experiences. 

But there is another dimension to this failure that remains unseen, the way the system administratively violates women who have already been hurt within their lives. 

I want to speak about those women, the ones who are criminalised instead of protected, and who continue to face bureaucratic violence long after the physical and sexual violence has ended.

For example, for a long time, MN lived in an abusive relationship marked by physical and sexual violence. Her partner often beat her, at one point so severely that she reported suffering a miscarriage. On the night of his death, he assaulted and raped her again. 

As she tried to escape the home, a struggle ensued, and he was killed. MN was arrested that same evening, charged with murder, and has been incarcerated since 2018. 

My colleagues and I at the Centre for Applied Legal Studies (CALS) have represented MN throughout her trial at Palmridge Magistrates’ Court, through her conviction, and now in her ongoing appeal to the Johannesburg High Court.

A feature that has remained constant in MN’s struggle for justice has been the extreme and relentless levels of administrative violence she has endured. She was denied bail and remained an awaiting-trial prisoner for almost four years. A delay that reflects not the complexity of her case, but the inertia of a system that views women like MN as dangerous and renders them invisible 

The years she spent waiting were not just lost to her; they were also stolen from her family. A mother of two minor children at the time of the incident, her son and daughter have been growing up without their mother. And what began as the state’s failure to protect her from abuse became a failure to protect her and her children from its own system.

Although MN was convicted and sentenced in 2022, she did not receive leave to appeal until this year, 2025. 

Three years of silence, missing transcripts, and bureaucratic back-and-forth stood between her and the simple right to challenge her conviction. 

The administrative battles have not eased; they have intensified, turning every step toward justice into another fight. The law could not be clearer: once the magistrate provides written reasons for their decision on the appeal, the clerk of the court must transmit the record to the appeal court within 10 days. 

In MN’s case, those reasons were signed on 19 June 2025. It is now more than 140 days later, and the record has still not been sent. A delay that should have lasted just over a week has stretched into nearly five months. This is not a clerical error; it is a violation of duty that keeps a woman’s life on hold. 

When the system ignores its own timelines, it turns bureaucracy into violence. 

That is what administrative harm looks like, harm caused not by a single act, but by a system that refuses to move. 

During 16 Days of Activism, the nation will be speaking about holding perpetrators to account for gender-based violence. But what happens when the perpetrator is the system itself? 

When the justice system disregards its own duties and deadlines, it does more than delay; it shows a profound indifference to the lives caught in its machinery. 

That indifference is its own kind of violence. MN now faces another challenge, whether to take the court to court, to remind it that justice delayed is not justice at all.